More gender speech issues

More Gender Speech Issues
| |Who Talks More, Men or Women? |
| |       A common cultural stereotype describes women as being talkative, always speaking and expressing their feelings. |
| |Well, this is probably true, however, do women do it more than men? No! In fact an experimentdesigned to measure the |
| |amount of speech produced suggested that men are more prone to use up more talking time than women. An experiment b y |
| |Marjorie Swacker entailed using three pictures by a fifteenth century Flemish artist, Albrecht Durer which were presented|
| |to men and women separately. They were told to take as much time as they wanted todescribe the pictures. The average |
| |time for males: 13.0 minutes, and the average time for women 3.17 minutes. |
| |Why is this? |
| |       Sociolinguists try to make the connection between our society and our languagein a way that suggests that women |
| |talk less because it has not always been as culturally acceptable as it has been for men. Men have tended to take on a |
| |more dominant role not only in the household, but in the business world. This ever-changing concept is becoming le ss |
| |applicable in our society, however, the trend is still prominent in some societiesacross the world. It is more |
| |acceptable for a man to be talkative, carry on long conversation, or a give a long wordy speech, however it is less |
| |acceptable for a women to do so. It has been more of a historical trend for men have more rights to talk. However , it is|
| |common for men to be more silent in situations that require them to expressemotion. Since childhood, they have been told|
| |to "keep their cool" and "remain calm, be a man." |
| | |
| |Do Men and Women Really Speak Differently?|
| |Can you tell who, most likely, is speaking? |
| |"Wow what a beautiful home!" |
| |"That outfit looks lovely on you!"|
| |"Nice coat." |
| |"Where can I find a pair of shoes like that, I like them." |
| |"This is a super cool shirt, I love it."|
| |"This shirt is cool." |
| |       Sometimes comment like these may be extremely stereotypical, however it is easy for any one to identify who the |
| |speaker is. In English we laugh at these utterances, however in somelanguages there are gender-exclusive speech patterns|
| |for men and women respectively. It is not uncommon to see these speech patterns cross-culturally to linguistically the |
| |gender of the speaker. Edward Sapir documented such occurrences in Yana, an American Indian language, where there are |
| |distinct words that are used for men and women respectively....